ARISTIPPUS. dissolute men, who are content with being prosperous at the present moment. And his life was quite consistent with his theory; for he spent the whole of it in all kinds of luxury and extravagance, both in perfumes, and dress, and women. Accordingly, he openly kept Lais as his mistress; and he delighted in all the extravagance of Dionysius, although he was often treated insultingly by him.
Accordingly, Hegesander says that once, when he was assigned a very mean place at a banquet by Dionysius, he endured it patiently; and when Dionysius asked him what he thought of his present place, in comparison of his yesterday's seat, he said, "That the one was much the same as the other; for that one," says he, "is a mean seat to-day, because it is deprived of me; but it was yesterday the most respectable seat in the room, owing to me: and this one to-day has become respectable, because of my presence in it; but yesterday it was an inglorious seat, as I was not present in it." And in another place Hegesander says—"Aristippus, being ducked with water by Dionysius's servants, and being ridiculed by Antiphon for bearing it patiently, said, 'But suppose I had been out fishing, and got wet, was I to have left my employment, and come away?'" And Aristippus sojourned a considerable time in Ægina, indulging in every kind of luxury; on which account Xenophon says in his Memorabilia, that Socrates often reproved him, and invented the apologue of Virtue and Pleasure to apply it to him. And Aristippus said, respecting Lais, "I have her, and I am not possessed by her." And when he was at the court of Dionysius, he once had a quarrel with some people about a choice of three women. And he used to wash with perfumes, and to say that—
E'en in the midst of Bacchanalian revels
A modest woman will not be corrupted.
And Alexis, turning him into ridicule in his Galatea, represents one of the slaves as speaking in the following manner of one of his disciples:—
For this my master once did turn his thoughts
To study, when he was a stripling young,
And set his mind to learn philosophy.
And then a Cyrenean, as he calls himself,
Named Aristippus, an ingenious sophist,
And far the first of all the men of his time,
